Transcript:
Eric: Webinars, webinars, webinars, webinars. I don’t know about you, but in my tenure, I feel like I’ve attended about a thousand of these, may be presented on a hundred or so, and a lot of them just suck. They’re poorly executed. I don’t know. Maybe I’m exaggerating but it just feels that way lately.
This is really timely for me at CoSchedule. We’ve been looking at our webinar efforts, evaluating the ROI because they take a lot of time and energy to produce one of these. Why do some webinars kick butt and why do some don’t, frankly? That is why I brought on today’s guest on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. His name is Todd Earwood, he’s the CEO of MoneyPath, and has also created the webinar training program called Webinar Works.
I wanted to ask him one main question and that was, “What is the biggest difference between those companies that are giving mediocre results for webinars and those who are truly driving sales results?” Boy, oh boy, Todd did not disappoint. He actually lays out what are the five key elements that go into making a webinar that works and truly drives sales results. It is a goodie.
I don’t want to give any more spoiler alerts because I want you to listen. It’s a fantastic episode. My name is Eric Piela. I am the Brand and Buzz Manager here at CoSchedule and I can’t wait to jump in on this conversation. All right, let’s get AMPed.
All right, let’s get to it. I’m so excited to welcome our guest, Todd Earwood. Todd, welcome to the Actionable Marketing Podcast.
Todd: I am so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Eric: Yeah, you bet. This is great. Our listeners are going to get a treat. You’ve got kind of a nice southern drawl and I’ve got the nice North Dakota Fargo accent.
Todd: Good deal.
Eric: Yeah. We’re going to hit both—
Todd: No joy listening to two wildly different accents.
Eric: Absolutely. Well, this is great. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I’m really pumped about the topic of webinars and driving sales and really getting into most out of them. Everyone, I think, knows webinars and have probably dabbled in webinars but I think I love to really dive into the difference between a great one and a mediocre one.
But before I do so, I want my listeners to know a little bit about you, Todd. I know you are the CEO of MoneyPath, you got a really interesting kind of background and [...] to where you’re at. I love if you could just share a little bit about your journey and experience with webinars.
Todd: Sure, Eric. I really appreciate it. I’m really glad to be here. The background is, I started my career at a billion dollar company where I called the CEO for 43 straight days until he gave me an interview. He let me work there for three years until he promptly said, “Todd, you’re too fast. Please, please, please go buy or build a business.”
I took his advice, thankfully, and I’ve been building businesses and I’ve really focused heavily in software space. We built a marketing software platform that we sold several years ago. I’ve done that time and time again. Then I got pushed by one of my investors, which is highly offensive, Eric. He was really frustrating to me, but he said, “Todd, your best skill is not building those software products. It’s all the wacky sales and marketing stuff you’re doing.”
Eric: That’s like a backhanded compliment, but in a good way, right?
Todd: Yeah and I didn’t want to hear it. I actually didn’t want to hear from him. But I was looking back, he said, “I’ve been investing in these other companies, Todd, and they can’t figure it out. They’ve got good products, they’ve got good services, but they can’t figure out how to scale. Can you just help one of them and see if it’s something you enjoy?”
That was my first client and then my accountant said, “Todd, you’ve got to put a name on this.” We’ve come up with MoneyPath, which is where we clear the path to purchase. One of the things we’ve done over time is do a lot of data research. We’ve actually hired data scientists to do some things. We dug in hard with what software companies were doing with marketing.
What we found was, by going through 25,000 of their marketing emails, the number one thing, as you can imagine, was kind of inbound content related emails. Number two was the webinar, and like you said, Eric, it’s an old tool. I kept thinking, why are the big SaaS companies doing this? The reality is it brings together marketing and sales, and that’s what got me pointed in this direction today.
Eric: Very cool. I know you have a webinar training program called Webinar Works as well. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Todd: Sure. My tool of choice at the moment, for certain types of customers—nine times out of ten—is HubSpot. I was doing lots of webinars for our clients and time and time again, they were just working. Now, we’ve done it in 17 different verticals, both B2B and B2C, and it was HubSpot who said, “Hey, you really should do something with this. Can you help us figure out how to make our webinars better?”
We went to help our other agency partners and our clients, then I talked to the GoToWebinar folks, and suddenly I was like, “Oh, I really have something unique and it is different.” Now, we’ve tried to productize that in a training course and some tools to allow people to, how do you not only have a webinar and create the content in a less time-consuming way, but how do you know you’re going to have an effective webinar. We kind of got rules of the road that can help you make sure it’s going to perform for you.
Eric: This is going to be great. I’m excited for this conversation. I brought this up to you before we went live here, but in full transparency to all our listeners, I was telling Todd that at CoSchedule, we actually just sort of put the big kibosh on webinars for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons just being, the amount of energy and effort we put into one to pull it off based on the results that we’ve got, we just decided, “Man, maybe we could use this time to do something more productive.”
When I finally had the opportunity to bring Todd on the show, I want to be so selfish that I’m going to ask like, “What are we doing wrong?” That’s kind of where I would love to start if you wouldn’t mind is, what’s the biggest difference between those companies or individuals that are giving mediocre results from webinars versus those who are truly driving sales and seeing big-time results from webinars?
Todd: I think there are several things. But I do think we could probably all agree we’ve been on a terrible webinar before. I’ve probably been on three this week. It’s very common to get into that issue of, “I thought the hook was great.” Just like if you’re clicking on a blog post or a social link, you thought that the hook of the content was great and you get there and it’s a dud.
I’ll tell you this story of, my father is a minister, retired now. You can probably envision this,but imagine you walk into church and my dad was there to greet you at the door. He says, “Welcome to the church. Come on in,” and then he does the announcements, and then he sing a song, and he says a prayer, then he does the sermon, and then he asks for your money, asks for altar call, then he greet you back at the door.
The number one thing we’re seeing is that’s what webinar host are doing. Somehow, you think you can hold the audience’s attention and keep them engaged with one voice for 30 to 45 to 60 or even some of the crazy folks who are doing 90-minute webinars. It’s really hard. Our rule of thumb is, unless you’re Adele, or maybe Kevin Hart, you can’t hold that stage, no matter how good the content is.
Our method that really sets us up apart is we have a host and a thought leader. You, Eric, if you’re the thought leader, you don’t need to come down here with us peasants and be talking about, “Let me do the housekeeping or how this webinar is going to go. Let me tell you about the poll we’re going to create.” No, that’s my job. I’m the host and you’re the thought leader.
By having a cadence, now our webinars are really—we don’t re-rehearse them—it’s not a tight, narrow script, but it’s a performance. It’s not death by PowerPoint where you’re going slide by slide. It’s a pass the mic back and forth in this smooth thing that keeps people engaged, and then we have a formula and the content that makes it really effective, not just for engagement to get the people and take action.
Eric: I love that sound bite, “It’s a performance, not a death by PowerPoint.” I think too many people, and I’m guilty of that, you put all that work right into getting the hook, getting them to register, and then you think of webinars, you just show up and then the content will be great and everything is going to be fantastic, and I think people don’t put enough energy and effort. I love that to kick off the show. That’s great.
I know you have this philosophy that there are five elements of a webinar that truly make it work. I would love if you could just walk through, myself and the listeners, about what you think those are.
Todd: Sure. I think the number one thing that everyone’s getting wrong on webinars is—and it makes a lot of folks, Eric, and you may fall on this camp, it makes a lot of folks give up on them is—we’re worried about the wrong metrics. Typically, we all worry about that live webinar metric, “I didn’t get that many registrations. Out of all the registrations, how many attended? And of those attended, how many purchased?”
For most people, those are the three buckets of success we’re measuring webinars by. Our clients instead are seeing something different. They’re saying, “If I’m going to take this much time to create so much content,” because this takes a lot of time, Eric. Not just the presentation but the registration emails and setting up with the webinar tool. It can be time intensive. We have some workarounds for that.
But what we found is, the number one thing people are doing is they’re only concerned about those metrics and while they’re important, I would argue that we’re going to invite people to a webinar. We’re going to (a) not call it a webinar. If you’re determined to do it, I ask instead you call it a private webinar. You don’t promote it on social. Instead, you take, which brings us to point number two—get the metrics about more, we’ll get into that about, it’s not just the one-time event—and number two is, you need to target a niche and then build that hook for that niche that repels away the other personas on your list.
I want to be super narrow in my webinar content because now, I want to make sure (a) it’s a private webinar, or (b) it’s a master class. I’m teaching. I’m not selling. I’m here to educate and help you, and oh by the way, if I do my job right, you’re probably going to end up buying CoSchedule.
That’s what we should be doing. We should not be saying the con job of, “Come in and learn the best ways to manage your social content,” and then find out, “Just kidding. I’ve got a feature product demo.” Most of us know better than to do that, but if you’ll get your target niche, nail that persona down and say, “I’m going to build a hook,” and we have several formulas for this, the best ways to do it, and the number one that keeps coming up is, you need to have a hook for that niche. It is about avoiding pain. We, as humans, will go to the end of the earth to not have pain, more than we will chase gain.
We’ve seen top five mistakes. Top Five Trends The Best Marketers Are Doing In 2018. By definition, you’re putting in the seed of doubt, that maybe I don’t know what those trends are or I’m making those mistakes. Top Five Pitfalls Made By Healthcare CFOs, is one we’ve done recently. People will gravitate, and if you’re really concerned about my first point about metrics on the live event, “Okay I’m going to juice your metrics because your real concern as marketers, we want those numbers to be good.” I’m going to tell you later how to make the other numbers be great, but does that makes sense if you can get that niche and get that hook about avoiding pain? That makes people gravitate towards you.
Eric: Yeah. I think there’s a lot to unpack there. I think there’s some great points. It’s almost like the vanity metrics. Like you said, the chicks and seats and how wide of a net can we cast so that I can say, “Hey, I had this many.” We all know 20% of the people actually show up, but I love that kind of flipping the script and really getting very intentional and kind of having that private feel, like this is just for you, with the real niche audience, I think, is a really interesting angle.
I guess I’m surprised and not surprised that people are drawn to, “How do I alleviate pain?” I love that. That basically speaks to them. You’ve seen better results when you focus on the pain that will be cured as opposed to the success and the gain. That’s great.
Todd: Yeah, that’s it. To give fair credit, we opted in 3 plus years ago to the top, at the time we started with this research experiment of about 200 SaaS companies, and we’ve expanded it now, I think was 600 plus SaaS companies. The data science has built this model to analyze, when do they send emails, what are they sending it about. It was a fascinating thing. It was far too advanced for me so I knew I had to go bring in better resources.
What we found was, when the webinar was number two and you start to look at the patterns, this is where big corp falls down. Their hooks were weak. They were not good at getting a great title but what they good at doing is targeting a niche. I think that was for the takeaway to say, “Okay, big corp’s not figuring it all out,” but they’re smart enough to say, because think about it, they got time and money. They can create tons of webinars. They would slice and dice to say, “How healthcare CFOs can do X.” Better said, I’ve seen people do this in, “How middle market or middle management marketing professionals can do Y.”
They don’t have a good hook that makes it really interesting, but you knew they were targeting a sliver of their total audience. By definition, if you’re CFO, better explanation CMO, and you’ve got some title that says middle management or manager/director, you’re not going to sign up for that.
I think that was the learning there. All the sales psychology that I just love so much that I can’t avoid was like, “Wow. If you married that, what do humans want more than anything else?” They actually want to avoid pain. They want to solve problems. Help me not do the bad stuff. That’s what we combine and that model works really, really well.
Eric: Well, when you hear that music, you know it’s halftime here on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. Just a quick reminder that we are now on Spotify so if you love streaming music there, you can now stream the podcast right when you’re listening to your favorite jams. Second of all, I would love, love, love a review on iTunes. It helps us to get discovered by more great marketers looking for content.
Please leave a rating and review, take a screenshot, send it to podcast@coschedule.com, and I will personally make sure that you get a nice little CoSchedule swag pack as a thank you for your time and for listening. That’s all I got. Let’s get back to our conversation with Todd.
All right, let’s continue along these elements. I like this.
Todd: Yes, I’ve already told you about the host and the thought leaders. It’s got to be a two person, it can be a three. But as marketers, there’s many times we drive leads and the sales folks say, “These leads stink. Your leads’ scoring method is not real good.” Well, the reality is, they’re not always right and sometimes, actually, they’re not wrong.
What we’ve done to eliminate that, and this is the third step, is I want you to follow my script to the hook, target a niche, have the host and the thought leader, and then I want you to have polls. People will be shocked by our webinars. More than 60% of people answer the poll. The magic is, do a poll in the beginning, which is a softball question, and literally, we’re wanting the people to click the buttons. It doesn’t matter, I want them engaged, so you’re not toggling to your 72 other Chrome tabs you have open.
The second thing is though, at the end of the presentation, again Eric, you’re the thought leader. You hand it off to me and I say, “Eric, thank you so much for teaching us about these top five mistakes that marketing CMOs are making today. I want to get a gauge of how you guys feel about this.” The question you ask is, “Now that you’ve learned this information, what is your next action step?”
Now, you’re going to measure the temperature of your leads. When 60% plus of those people click the buttons, we’re going to strategically offer them four options. Examples might be: interesting topics I need to research more. Not a hot lead. I can’t believe this. I have to hand this off to so-and-so. Warmly, but you also know they’re not the decision-maker. If you start asking questions like this, salespeople will love you because you asked a strategic question to say, “What do you want to do with this education?”
Now, I’ve even got really sophisticated clients who are not only taking that poll answer and handing it to sales, they are also saying, “I want to do my follow-up to be segmented by what they said if they did answer, so I can push them to buy, push them to demo, push them to research more or content, based on the temperature of the lead.”
Eric: Yeah, I love that. Every marketer should be looking at how can I personalize and segment that and how to write
the right call to action based on where they at and that decision process. That’s fantastic.
Todd: It has been a game changer for us by offering that late end of a presentation. As you end the presentation, you go, “Now...” Again, you should have two or three people and not just one. Think of a host as an emcee. The emcee should be able to easily take care of that for you and you’re going to measure the temperature of the lead.
Now, Eric, I’ll throw one other alternative and therefore you, other people that don’t want to do the action instead because we like to block our content, in fact, they say BuzzFeed style, ballistical style. As humans and other weird behavior’s the top 11 ways and now as marketers, we bastardize that human, say, top 100 ways, top 200 ways. That’s what we do.
But the reality is, we’re going to do the top five mistakes, as I’ve used the example for you, I’m going to now ask a different question. Sales reps love this, too. You say, “Of the top five mistakes, which one most resonate with you?” And now, again, segmented follow-up, I’ve not tagged that person and say, “Oh, they have an issue with document management. Oh, they have an issue with social media management.” Whatever it may be, you’re now tagging them with what their pain point is, and you can write great copy on that later, you can push them in specific landing pages or other content or go to sales rep who can speak to them about that issue.
Eric: This is good. I think what we’re really focusing on is do the important piece of the webinar. You’ve talked about some interesting things to create the hook, what to focus on, but I love thinking strategically about your webinar as an actual sales driver and not thinking of it too passively. We’re just providing thought leadership here. No, we can actually use these individuals, learn more about them, and actually use it as a sales tool, I wouldn’t say in an aggressive way but a more methodical way. I am guilty. I have not thought of that in that fashion, particularly.
Todd: Well, yeah. If you think about it as on the front end from the marketing perspective for those of you that are sometimes sales resistant—I can understand why—but think of it this way. You as a marketer are going to carve out a sliver of your target audience, with a specific title on the hook. You’re then going to pull them by asking how they feel about the content, but the middle is still thought leadership.
I’m just packaged by doing a couple of strategic things. It never comes off as salesy. We’ve all been on that probably crazy webinar where they say, “Now, wait until the end and you’re going to have the special offer,” and then they hit you with like 97 different bonuses that you’re going to get if you buy something.
We don’t need to be those people. As a matter of fact, none of my clients are going to do that. If you’re going to do that, there’s a bazillion other internet marketers that can tell you how to do that. But as real marketers, as I would say, targeting real businesses and real customers, I think we can influence our thought leadership content with a little bit of sales strategic decisions that actually get both parties to win.
Eric: I like that a lot. I think it’s a good lens to be looking at your webinars in the right way and finding that right balance. I think that’s the important piece, finding the right balance if it doesn’t feel too salesy but you’re being smart about how you bookend potentially that thought leadership.
At the end of the day, thought leadership is just soft sales. But I think being smart about you have a captured audience, you have their attention, how do we maximize that attention? Do you have any recommendation on how long do you follow-up? You got this email address and then like, “Hey, I signed up for this,” and then next thing you know, you drop them into every other campaign you have. What have you found that works and doesn’t work and how much is a webinar attendee willing to take in terms of follow-up until they snap?
Todd: You nailed it for me, Eric. Thank you for segue me right into point number four. Point number four is segmented follow-up. Now, I’ve given you a couple of things about how the advanced people are doing it, by strategically custom messaging based on poll results. But if you don’t want to go that route and it’s more of a maybe a B2B offline sales process, I will tell you that no matter what your sales process is, the segmented follow-up, the best way I’ve seen is I want to easily say, “I want the registered and attended as my first target.” Obviously, the warmest people because, again, if you think about marketing assets we have, this has a pretty high level of intent if you use my niche in the hook because now you know who this person is and,”Oh by the way, they sat 42 minutes in a webinar.” that’s some high intent.
We do segmented follow-up first. You have actually attended. Great. The next group is you registered but couldn’t make it. To answer your question, I’m going to send three emails to both of these groups. I’m going to make sure, “Hey, Eric, you registered but didn’t attend. I’m sure you were busy,” now we’re getting into copywriting, “I’m sure you were busy and something came up, I totally understand.” A lot of people even sign-up just for replays. GotoWebinar says that number’s almost 20% now. They just want the replay. Offer it to them.
But again, if you’re strategic about it, I’m also following up with once you watch the replay, that’s the catch. For those that don’t watch the replay, I’m going to do three invites to watch the replay. If they watch it, I’m going to have a different sequence on replay follow-up because now, start treating them like an attendee. Does that make sense?
Eric: Yeah, it does. You don’t get the poll information probably from them.
Todd: You don’t necessarily, but what you can do is, if you imagine if you’re building a landing page where there’s a showroom, or actually a replay room where you could probably got an embedded MP4 video, Wistia, one of the platforms, what you can do is a lot of these platforms you can say, “At the end of it, I want to either make a form appear, or if you don’t, just put that poll question as a web form below with five boxes.” Ask the same question with the four options. That’s another option.
Finally, a commonly missed opportunity is you didn’t email the replay to those who never registered. I will send two emails to those who never registered and say, “I’ve emailed you several times, Eric. You’re probably busy, maybe you’re uninterested, but just in case you are, we had a really positive reaction to the content. I would love for you to have a chance to watch it. Here’s the replay.” I’m going to take a couple of stabs at that and you’ll be shocked you can pick up 10%-15% extra views just by doing that.
Eric: I love that. I never would have thought of that, Todd, just to say, “Hey, you didn’t register but you’re on my list. I think you’re going to love this anyway. If you have time, check this out, it was well-received.” That is interesting and you’re saying that you’re getting good results, 10%-15% uptake just by hitting that audience again and just serving it to them. Say, “You don’t need to register. Here it is for you.”
Todd: That’s it. You don’t forget those people because a lot of us, if we have a big list, maybe we forgot, maybe we don’t really know, with think they’re the persona, we’re not sure, that’s fine. Some of that you’re going to miss and they’re never going to sign up and that’s okay. But you’ll be shocked at how many people will react to, “You can just watch it right now.”
They see the email and they go, “Oh, I’m on vacation next week, so I can’t do next Tuesday,” and they ignore it. You’d be shocked at how many people, they won’t even sign-up for the replay, when you actually just offer, “Click here and watch it right now,” there you go. You can get more people.
Eric: I love that. All right. I’m on edge in my seat for the last one, Todd.
Todd: Marketers are going to love number five. Number five is, we’re going to create a can of soup, if you can believe this. One of our interns started trying to help me figure out an analogy and that is, we’re going to repurpose our content. Nate, one of our interns said, “Why don’t you create a can of soup?” and I was like, “Nate, I don’t know what you’re referring to, son, but that’s not it,” and he said, “Oh man, did you know Campbell Soup could sit on a shelf for one to four years?”
Now, none of us probably want to eat the three-year-old soup, but I will tell you, we have a
repurposing content strategy that now that you’ve got a big asset like an MP4 that’s on any of these webinar platforms, you’ve got video. If you use our method of top five mistakes, you should have five videos. We should also use rev.com or some transcription service and start creating other content.
But the reality is, what I like to do best is repurpose that content and stretch out that value of the webinar to be way beyond that one-time event and a couple of weeks of follow-up, it should be way more than a year if we do it right. I like to focus in and let’s just say the example was Top Five Mistakes CMOs Are Making With Social, then I would have video number one is a solitary first point of the five, that’s a solitary video, that is a landing page, maybe on a blog post where you can pull that content out, and I would start to think about on the B2B side, salespeople are going to love you for this.
You’re not giving them five different assets to say, “Hey, if you get the objection of one of our personas, which happens to be the one we did the webinar on, and they have this issue, here’s a video you can send to them.” And now, it’s not a PDF sales slick instead, it’s a nice piece of content that educates people. If we repurpose that, the value and the length of time a value we’re going to get from that webinar is far greater than that single little event that we were worried so much about registrations.
Eric: Yeah. Wow. That totally changes the calculation for your ROI. I think you’re right. I think you think of webinars as a singular event but if you can itemize that content, that webinar and break up into other pieces of content and if it’s evergreen, use it for as long as you can and have that be a lead generator. I think that’s great. Again, I’m like a broken record, but I just really didn’t think about, “Where were you when I was making this...” There’s still time.
Todd: Yeah, there is time. As of this recording time, last week I was in California visiting GoToWebinar’s headquarters talking about some things we’re going to do together and going through with their team about like this is not new technology as marketers, we’ve all tried it. One of our clients, Lisa, was awesome. She said, “I’ve done probably 200 plus webinars because my VP loves it so much.” And she said, “I know exactly how much time it takes. It takes 36 man-hours.” And she said, “With your system, I think I can probably do this in 3-4 hours,” because you’ve got a formula to follow.
As marketers, we’ve got so many tasks, I mean, I really empathize with marketers because we’re only asked to do 78 things each week, and the next article that our executives read about marketing is like, “Why aren’t you doing SnapChat filters? Why aren’t you doing the next podcast thing?” Now, we get asked and tasked to do so much. Webinars’ something when you frame it the correct way, it adds crazy value in the business, it’s something that you have a formula to actually overcome the issue of like, “Oh, man it takes so much time,” and then the salespeople love it affecting the business of growth of the actual company with warmer, higher intent leads.
Eric: Yeah. Listeners, I hope you’ve been taking copious notes. There was a lot of good things and I think it’s really changing, from my perspective personally, just changing the perspective on what a webinar is and how it should be conducted and really the ways to use it. I think some really insightful things. I think it’s so easy to approach a webinar just the same way over and over again and I think this provides a beautiful new way to approach it. Lots of good things and I know our listeners can go and implement right away.
Todd, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.
Todd: Thank you, Eric. It’s been great, dude. I appreciate that you start us off with, “Hey, man. I just got done using webinar.” I hope we’ve helped you see that there is a way to use them effectively and not cause you too much stress.
Eric: No, absolutely. A lot of good things to consider with webinars and hopefully, again our listeners are doing the same thing. Thanks so much, Todd. I appreciate you coming on the show again and best of luck with you and your business. Let our listeners know, where can they go to learn more if they are curious about MoneyPath or your efforts there?
Todd: I would go to webinarworks.co. I’ve actually built the landing page for your listeners at webinarworks.co/. What you can do there is see all the different reasons why things we’ve talked about in further depth. But more importantly. I’ve got some free resources for you to check out, to find out, is webinar good for you and how to grade yourself on these ideas that I’ve been proposing to you, how you fit against those who are really doing it effectively.
Eric: Awesome. Well, happy to promote your services. You get great feedback for our listeners. Awesome. Thanks again, Todd. Take care.
Todd: Take care, Eric. I appreciate it.
Eric: You got it.